


The Future Starts with You

by dyrimthespeaker



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Portal, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-08
Updated: 2018-05-01
Packaged: 2019-03-02 12:07:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13317768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dyrimthespeaker/pseuds/dyrimthespeaker
Summary: Mickey Milkovich had spent the majority of his life as a test subject. Ian Gallagher had studied hard to become a scientist. Neither one was prepared for the depths of corruption and potentially apocalyptic danger that lay deep within the lab.





	1. The Awakening

**Author's Note:**

> It's been a while huh? Here I am back and still loving Mickey Milkovich!
> 
> So guess what I love the Portal games and decided to write a Portal au. After spending more time than was probably reasonable assembling all the dates and lore and such for the entire Portal/Half-Life universe and trying to figure out how to fit this story into the timeline without completely wrecking it (thus rendering it impossible and full of plot holes) or writing a literal retelling of the game, but featuring Mickey and Ian instead of Chell and Rattmann (which would be boring), I’ve realized that I’m just going to have to play fast and loose with Portal canon. I’m hoping I’ve worked out a plot based enough on the timeline and lore that it evokes the right atmosphere.
> 
> Given my decision to say “fuck it” and do what I want using elements of the games, I will be using characters, events, and such from the games in this story, but I will be tweaking them and repurposing things for my own use. As such, if you’re familiar with the games know that things won’t fit the proper narrative anymore. And if you’re unfamiliar with the games then I hope this is an engaging story despite your lack of familiarity with the setting!
> 
> So warning, there will be spoilers for the games even though things aren’t quite the same. Being familiar with them isn’t necessary to read this fic, but if you haven’t played them I highly recommend you do because they’re great games!
> 
> Title from the Portal 2 soundtrack.

Mickey woke up with the familiar feeling of his Stasis Chamber bringing him back to consciousness. He blinked his eyes open and frowned. His body was… sore. Achy. Like he hadn’t used it in a while. Which, given he’d been in suspension, he hadn’t, but he was never kept in suspension so long that he’d actually feel the effects of long-term bed rest. His frown deepened and he sat up.

Glancing around his Relaxation Vault he noticed the room itself was in bad shape.

The room seemed to be in disrepair. It was definitely his Relaxation Vault, but it looked as if it had aged significantly since the last time he was awake. He stood up on slightly sore legs and began to explore the room. The UV light panel that took up the entire far wall of the room was dim and flickered every so often. A thick layer of dust blanketed the tops of all the furniture in the room. Instead of looking just like a cheap motel room as it usually did, it looked like the cheapest motel in the apocalypse.

Something was seriously wrong.

As he walked around the automated message system kicked on.

A robotic male voice spoke from a speaker in the ceiling, “You have been in suspension for nine—nine—nine—nine—nine—“ The glitching voice cut off with the harsh sound of static then went dead.

Well that wasn’t good.

He opened his mini fridge only to find it empty save for a bottle of water. He picked up the bottle and realized it was room temperature. The fridge wasn’t on. Looking behind it at the wall he saw it was still plugged in. The power had to be off. Or, Mickey glanced at the UV light wall again, most likely on limited supply.

He opened the small cabinet next to the mini fridge and was relieved to find a few packages of dried emergency food. He grabbed them and shoved them in one of his jumpsuit pockets. He wasn’t hungry now given he’d been sustained through his Stasis Chamber, but with the state of the room he wasn’t confident that things were running as usual. It was better to be prepared with whatever he could find before he tried to investigate.

Mickey walked to the center of the room and began doing his standard post-suspension stretches. Over his time at Aperture Laboratories it had been explained to him many times just how important the post-suspension stretches were in order to remain limber and prepared for the physical strain of testing. It seemed even more important now given he had been in suspension for an unknown amount of time and was facing an unknown, but likely terrible situation once he left his Relaxation Vault.

And he definitely needed to leave. No way was he going to sit on his ass and starve to death in his piece of shit run-down Relaxation Vault. Waiting around wouldn’t get him anything because if the lack of power and amount of dust indicated anything, it was that he was long forgotten. He’d have to save himself.

If he was going to bust out of here he was going to be comfortable while doing it. He unzipped the top part of his orange jumpsuit and shrugged it off his shoulders exposing the white tanktop he wore underneath. He grabbed the sleeves before they could hit the floor and folded the fabric so he could tie the sleeves around his hips without having too much extra fabric loose around him. He preferred to wear the jumpsuit like this and had learned to tie it so he could move around easily.

He looked down at his feet, which were clad in the soft slippers he used in his Relaxation Vault. Hopefully his long-fall boots were still in the closet where he left them, or this escape was sure to be a hell of a lot harder.

Opening the closet door, he was relieved to see his long-fall boots standing right where he’d left them. He grabbed them and took them over to the desk so he could sit on the chair to put them on. He kicked off his slippers and shoved his feet down into the boots. As soon as he had his feet properly situated in the hard plastic casings of the boots he tightened the supports that went up his calves. He stood up and jumped once to test they were on properly.

Satisfied that he was as well equipped as possible, he turned his attention to getting out of his Relaxation Vault.

He tried the doorknob, only to find the door locked. Of course, that would be far too easy. He moved to the other side of the door and inspected the hinges. They looked to be standard metal hinges. Thank fuck Aperture was still using regular doors on the Relaxation Vaults rather than the electronically controlled ones they used in other parts of the facility.

Mickey unstrapped and pulled off one of his long-fall boots and wedged the strip of metal on the back of it under the head of the hinge pin. It was awkward to figure out the right angle, but once he managed it he used it to work the pin out of the hinge. He repeated the process on the upper hinge of the door, grunting with effort. Finally, he worked the pin free and stood back, taking a few deeps breaths.

He leaned against the wall and got the boot strapped back on, then grabbed at the newly pin-less hinges and tried to pull the door inward. It took some work to get enough of a grip on the small bits of metal, but he managed to get the door pulled out of the frame. Looking out, he expected to see a hall lined with the doors to other Relaxation Vaults, but instead he was faced with a sheer drop.

Unfortunately, it seemed that his Relaxation Vault had been moved down to storage.

He held onto the door frame and leaned out to try to get a handle on just how far up his Vault was. Down in storage they kept the chambers stacked on top of each other, creating indoor skyscrapers out of what looked like storage containers. He snorted to himself as he realized that the outside of the Relaxation Vault looked exactly like big shipping cargo containers.

If that didn’t say everything about how Aperture viewed test subjects.

Luckily his Vault wasn’t at the top of a stack, but it was still far higher than he’d like. Even with his long-fall boots he wasn’t comfortable just jumping out and hoping they’d absorb the shock. They may have been designed for that, but he wasn’t going to risk a jump that far unless he had no other choice.

His chamber was in the middle of a stack, which meant he couldn’t climb on top of it and take advantage of the height. The only options were to climb down from the doorway or get himself to another stack. He kneeled down and surveyed the Vaults below him for any sort of hand holds he could use to climb. They were few and far between.

Staring down at the drop didn’t turn his stomach, he was far too used to heights and the element of danger. As long as he didn’t try to pull some jackass stunt he knew he could survive a fall no problem.

He stood back up. Climbing seemed to be a no-go, which meant it was time to try to figure out how to get to the next stack. He looked out of the nearby stacks and noticed one had some scaffolding looking shit around it. Bingo.

Mickey walked back into his Vault to get a running start. Jackass stunt to jump from one stack to another? Maybe, if you hadn’t spent years training like he had.

He took a deep breath and then pushed off, gaining momentum as he ran the short distance of his Vault. As soon as he reached the doorway he kicked off and propelled himself across the free space to the next stack. He smacked against the side of a Vault with a solid thud and managed to grab hold of one of the scaffolding bars. He held on and gave himself a moment to breathe and assess his new position.

The scaffolding wasn’t perfect, but he could make it work and climb down. He edged along the bar until he could reach a place that he could drop to the next bar lower. He continued to work his way around the stack climbing down from bar to bar until he reached a point that the scaffolding stopped.

He wasn’t quite as high anymore, but he definitely wasn’t anywhere close to the ground. The floor below him still looked more like a dimly-lit void than an actual floor. Mickey was considering the pros and cons of just dropping and letting the long-fall boots do their best when he caught sight of a walkway bridge nearby.

Aperture had whole systems of walkways suspended throughout the labs. They were made of metal with guard rails and they wove through the entire facility connecting rooms to each other and allowing people to navigate spaces, including giant open rooms like the storage room.

If he could get himself over there he would be linked back into actual pathways to get himself out.

The walkway was too far to jump without any kind of build up. If he tried to just leap off where he was he’d definitely fall short. He needed some sort of momentum.

What he wouldn’t do for a fucking portal gun right now.

But with no portal gun and no space to run there was only one thing to do. Climb back up the scaffolding and try to jump off from the right height and at the right angle to launch himself over to the walkway. He groaned as he realized he’d have to undo all the work he did just to get down where he was.

After taking a minute to curse his situation he began to climb back up. Let no one say Mickey Milkovich would be bested by Aperture’s architecture. He was going to get himself to that walkway, even if he had to climb all the way back to the top of the stack.

Once he reached what he felt was the right height he stopped to get his bearings and calculate the angle at which to push off of the stack. He was so used to making mid-air calculations that he didn’t bother quantifying them anymore, he just knew what looked right.

He grabbed better hold of the scaffolding and brought his legs up so his feet were flat against the side of the stack and his back was to the ground. Jumping like this would mean he was facing up, but if he twisted right as he pushed off he could spin himself to face down again as he fell.

He pushed his legs a couple times while keeping a firm grip on the bar above him, just to get a feel for how he wanted to execute the jump. Then he took a deep breath and used all his strength to kick off of the side of the stack.

As he twisted midair and fell he could see the walkway coming into range. He reached out and managed to grab hold of the rail just as he was dropping past it. He grunted as he came to a jarring stop holding the guardrail, then heaved himself over the side and fell flat on his back on the floor of the walkway.

Mickey one, Aperture zero.

He groaned and lay there for a moment before sitting up and stretching again. His shoulders were a little sore, but that beat being stuck or dead any day. And now he could at least walk out of storage instead of continuing to climb and jump.

He started down the walkway, not really caring about which direction was ‘right’. Either way he went he’d end up back in the labs proper and from there he could navigate his way out. He reached the end of the walkway where a large electronic door stood closed before him.

“Fuck.”

He wasn’t in the habit of talking to himself much, but the idea of trying to break down an electronic door by hand warranted cursing aloud instead of just thinking it.

He reached out and pressed the button to open it, hoping desperately that it would really be that simple, and was relieved to see the halves of the door part and slide into the wall allowing him entry. At least whatever low level power the facility was running on was still keeping the basic shit like the doors operating.

Mickey walked in and found himself in a room he’d never seen before. This was obviously a scientists-only level. But—he looked around at the filing cabinets—not a very exciting one.

Dust coated the cabinets and the room looked as though it hadn’t been disturbed in a long time, much like his Relaxation Vault. He moved quickly and quietly across the room and through the door into the next. The following rooms looked to be file storage as well and it wasn’t until he came to a room full of desks that he paused.

Paperwork was still out on the desks. A coffee mug. Chairs pulled out as though their inhabitants had gotten up in a rush and hadn’t had the time to push them back in. A feeling of delayed horror crept over Mickey. He knew something had happened and he’d been forgotten in the aftermath, but it wasn’t until this moment facing evidence of the complete absence of everyone else that the dread felt real to him.

In all his years at Aperture he had never once been left unattended anywhere that wasn’t his Relaxation Vault. And even then he was always locked in with monitors and security features so he wasn’t really alone, just by himself exactly where they wanted him.

He looked over at the computers, disquieted by the black screens and deathly silence.

Where was everyone? And just how much danger was he in?

For an existence that had been lonely in so many ways, he hadn’t realized just how loud and full of people his life really was until he was confronted by their absence. Not that he missed the scientists. He just feared what their absence meant.

Mickey knew the scientists didn’t regard him as very smart. At least, not in the same way that they considered themselves smart. He was seen as clever in terms of testing, but that was about it. He had learned over his years in the labs that most of the scientists would talk about him as if he wasn’t there. Praise him for solving puzzles, berate him for struggling. All of that went in his reports anyway though, so it wasn’t as if that information was any great secret.

No, the secrets came from the scientists gossiping. And gossip they did. When you treat people as less intelligent, or as merely test subjects, you start to forget their humanity. And as you forget their humanity you stop censoring yourself as heavily around them.

Mickey took advantage of that by staying quiet and listening in on any conversation he could.

Before his last session in the Relaxation Vault he’d heard worries about Black Mesa. Not that that was new. The scientists at Aperture always seemed to be worried about Black Mesa. Was Black Mesa outdoing them in testing? Was Black Mesa making greater advances faster? Would Black Mesa be chosen for government weapons contracts? Science contracts? Was Black Mesa stealing inventions? Were there Black Mesa spies among them at Aperture? The list of worries was endless.

He wondered if they’d been onto something and there had been some sort of Aperture Science versus Black Mesa showdown that resulted in Aperture shutting down.

If so, fuck Aperture and Black Mesa both for leaving him to die.

He steeled himself and continued his way out of the office room. Come hell or high water, he was going to get out.

After wandering through a few more filing and desk type rooms, Mickey found himself turning a corner and reaching one of the control rooms. There were monitors and computers everywhere, though they were all turned off. All of the windows along the far wall were cracked and one was broken and had what looked like vines growing through it.

Mickey frowned. To his knowledge there shouldn’t be plants growing freely in the facility, no matter how much time had passed. Plants didn’t grow naturally underground.

He wasn’t sure how far underground he was, but he knew he was. That was the entire point of things like UV light walls. There was no sun and all the windows of the facility just showed other rooms. He could barely remember the last time he’d seen the actual sun.

He cautiously approached the vine. It didn’t move or appear to be anything other than a normal, though exceptionally out of place plant.

Still, better safe than sorry. He picked up a pen off a nearby desk and used that to prod the plant gently. It didn’t react in any way except to move with the pressure.

Satisfied that the mystery vine was bizarre, but likely of no threat to him personally, Mickey tossed the pen aside and continued on his way. After leaving the control room he reached a hallway and the first real directions so far.

A sign on the wall declared that _Equipment Storage_ could be found to the left and more offices to the right.

Equipment storage sounded like the far more useful of the two. Maybe it would be stocked still and he could get some better tools to aid in his escape.

He walked down the hall until he reached a large door labelled _Equipment Storage_. It was an electronic door, but it was partially open and the two parts of the doors were jolting every few seconds like they were trying to open or close, but were being stopped by some invisible barrier. He walked closer, but stopped when sparks flew from one side of the doorway.

Mickey watched for a few moments, cataloguing when the doors were at their widest, how long they stayed like that, and how frequent and intense the sparks were. He tensed up and moved closer, preparing himself to dart through at just the right second. He counted down in his head and on ‘three’ he managed to squeeze through just before another round of sparks started.

He quickly put some space between himself and the malfunctioning door. Looking around, he found that equipment storage was definitely the right call. The walls were lined with a whole host of tools and tech and further back in the room was a metal cage-like wall with a door, behind which appeared to be even more tech, likely more powerful than the rest.

He grabbed the nearest object that could serve as a crow bar and used it to jimmy the door to the cage open. Once inside he was relieved to see a portal gun. He grabbed it and strapped it to his arm. It turned on right away and he shot a portal at the far wall. It worked perfectly.

Finally, some luck was on his side. A portal gun meant he could traverse even treacherous terrain with ease. They were designed to create doorways anywhere. One portal on one surface, a second elsewhere. Then you merely had to step through a portal and you would instantly find yourself stepping out of the other.

He had absolutely no idea how it worked, but he’d been using portal guns for years in his testing. He could be falling to his doom with a deadly laser ready to strike and still figure out where to shoot portals in order to get out alive. He was one of the best test subjects for a reason.

The familiarity of his equipment almost made it feel like he was starting yet another test. And those he was painfully familiar with.

Hell, escaping the facility alive was nothing more than the ultimate test, right?

Mickey shot an additional portal through the gap in the malfunctioning electronic doors out into the hallway, then used the portal already in the room with him as the link between the two. He stepped through, back into the hallway and avoiding the sparking doors entirely. It was high time to get out of Aperture and see what was going on in the rest of the world.

It had been over a decade since Mickey had last been outside the facility and he was more than ready to make his escape.


	2. The Escape

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s not that Mickey expected his grand escape to be easy, but if just one thing would go his way he’d really appreciate it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading!! I’m really excited about this fic and I’m so glad others are enjoying it!!
> 
> Just a note that the science is a little wonky in this given we're playing with video game science and I've decided to not get too bogged down in details of exactly what hard light beams are, etc just because to explain it all in depth as it functions in the Portal series I think would take too much narrative space when it's really not very important to the plot. So if you're very familiar with science just know that.
> 
> Also the name “Harold J Allen” is completely made up and isn’t a reference in Portal or Shameless. I just needed a generic name, thanks name generators!
> 
> PS Writing in GLaDOS's voice was a hell of a lot of fun!

Aided by the portal gun, Mickey had been able to make progress moving through the facility faster. Every room and hall he passed through had been just as dilapidated as those before. Full of dust, general disarray, and a surprising number of plants.

The vines he’d first seen back in one of the monitoring rooms were just the beginning. As he reached the main levels of the labs, above storage, he discovered that there had been some sort of plant takeover of the whole place.

Seemingly harmless, the vines stretched through the halls and poked through the holes of shattered glass windows. He still gave them as much space as he could, unwilling to fully trust that such extensive plantlife capable of thriving underground could be wholly benign.

Upon reaching the main levels, he found himself in the familiar territory of white and grey tiled walls and floors with frosted glass windows placed high up, connecting the main chambers to scientists offices while obscuring the views between. The testing rooms.

The decay had reached them just as it had the rest of the facility. Though familiar to Mickey, they also felt newly foreign.

Like a place you visited a lot as a kid that went out of business and was overgrown with weeds and graffiti. You knew how things were supposed to be and you could still see it, but it was no longer the same.

Mickey looked around at loose tiles that has fallen, exposing metal framework and concrete. There were spots that looked like water damage and cracked observation windows. Wires hung down through holes in the ceiling. It looked wholly abandoned and run down.

What was once a sleek and state of the art facility with a cold and clinical feel was now a husk of its former glory, softened by plantlife and disuse.

Despite this, there were still indications of Aperture’s technological prowess. The majority of the electronic doors Mickey encountered were still working, their blue lights glowing strong.

He walked through a passage and his movement tripped a prerecorded message. He jumped at the sound of static from the speaker above, then scoffed at his own nerves. Prerecorded messages were very familiar, but the sudden noise in what had been complete silence was jarring.

“You are hearing this message due to circumstances of potentially apocalyptic significance. Please remain calm.”

This better not be the fucking apocalypse, Mickey thought to himself. If the world had ended and he was left to rot deep in the bowels of Aperture he was going to be pissed.

Well, even more pissed than he already was.

“Aperture Laboratories is dedicated to furthering the pursuit of science regardless of the state of the world, no matter how dire,” the robotic male voice continued, “In the event that there is no staff to record the outcomes of your tests, please make notes of your successes and failures yourself. Thank you, test subject, for your dedication to science. Please continue to test chamber one.”

Mickey snorted. As fucking if. In what world would he willingly test himself? For Aperture’s sake? Fuck that.

He walked past the door to the test chamber and continued his search for a way out. He wasn’t sure where the labs connected with access to the outside. He definitely needed to be moving up so he could reach ground level, but he had yet to find any indication of how far up he needed to go or how to get there.

Still, he pushed on until he reached what were obviously the higher level tech control rooms. Here he found evidence of even more panic than he’d previously found. Papers were strewn about the room and chairs were knocked over. There was a red telephone hanging off its hook. It looked bizarrely old-fashioned and out of place in such a high tech facility.

Mickey snuck through the room, his gut telling him he really shouldn’t be here. Not only was it definitely out-of-bounds for him, but the aura of alarm was palpable. He wasn’t one to back down from danger, but he had enough self-preservation instincts to recognize how  _ wrong  _ the whole room felt.

A sign on a door on the far wall caught his attention.

_ Main Controls - AI  
_ _ Level 50 Access Only _

Well fuck. Mickey didn’t know for sure, but if he’d had to guess he’d say he was probably at negative fifty on the access level scale.

He walked over to it and tried the button anyway.

_ Swipe keycard for access _

Mickey stared at the message on the screen to the right of the door. He didn’t have a fucking keycard and even if he did there was no way a test subject would have high level clearance.

_ Access denied - timeout error _

He sucked his lower lip into his mouth and worried it between his teeth, thinking about how exactly he could get in. Maybe he could short the electronic door mechanisms with a blast from the portal gun?

Mickey popped his lip out from between his teeth and aimed. The laser blast from his portal gun bounced off the metal door with a high shriek and left a slightly blackened but still firmly shut door behind.

So that was a no.

He turned back and started rifling through papers in search of any information of a way out. An elevator or stairs or something. Anything that would get him to the surface. None of what he found was of any help, just a lot of data sheets and numbers unattached to any context that would make them useful to him.

The phone caught his attention again. Bright red and distinctly old fashioned, it dangled from one of those curly cords. Mickey vaguely remembered having one of them in his childhood home. That one hadn’t been bright red though, it was more of a dingy dirty cream color. But he could remember his ma using it, her hair up in a messy bun and the phone cradled between her shoulder and cheek so her hands would be free to cook.

He refocused on the phone. Could it really be as easy as dialing 911? Call the cops to bust him out? That would be a first.

Mickey had never been in trouble with the law, but his old man had been in and out of prison his whole life. He remembered as a kid thinking adults he met who hadn’t done any time were the odd ones out. That was before Aperture though. Still, his gut told him not to trust cops and his gut had yet to steer him wrong.

He filed the phone away as a last resort if he didn’t find any other viable methods to get himself out. He’d prefer to be active and not sit on his ass waiting for someone to figure out how to get him anyway.

As he moved further back through the room the end of a lanyard sticking out of the pocket of a labcoat draped over the back of one of the still upright chairs caught his eye. Keys perhaps? Certainly worth an inspection. He grabbed the lanyard which revealed it was attached to a keycard. He held it up.

_ Dr. Harold J. Allen  
_ _ Level 50 _

Level 50. He looked back over at the locked main control doors. A level 50 keycard…

He quickly made his way back over to it and this time swiped Dr. Allen’s keycard when prompted. It was accepted and the doors slid open. He stepped inside to find an overwhelming number of buttons and levers.

Tiny buttons and switches with different colored labels and lights lined the walls. It was dizzying to look at, much less try to actually figure out. He stepped closer and started trying to decipher what buttons might be useful. Most of the labels were meaningless to him.

He continued to scan, hoping a keyword like “elevator” or “exit” would jump out at him.

There were even more buttons above his eye level and he stood on his tiptoes to try to see those as well, but as he moved along the wall he struggled to find anything that seemed helpful. Beginning to wonder if he should risk just pressing random buttons, he decided to look lower and eliminate ones that seemed certainly unhelpful, then revisit ones that seemed slightly more promising.

It was as these thoughts were passing through his mind that there was a sudden power surge. First the emergency lights went out leaving him in complete darkness, then the lights went to full power and there was a flood of noise around him. The sound of a million computers booting up. He could almost feel the power pulsing through his surroundings. He jerked back, startled, then he felt the floor rumble and start to ascend. The room he was in was somehow an elevator.

Fuck. Maybe this was the way out?

As the elevator room rose he realized the room wasn’t an elevator, the floor below him was a platform unattached to the walls. As it rose more and more buttons were activated by the floor passing them. The function of the room seemed to serve a dual purpose of activating everything while also going up. He stood there, slowly rising and hoping that it really was the elevator all the way to the surface. Or at least to the ground floor. When he reached the top of the shaft what had been the ceiling retracted and let him out into a large chamber.

“Oh. Another human.”

And with that, all hope Mickey had felt was squashed and instead he was filled with an overwhelming feeling of dread.

He knew that voice.

It was GLaDOS, the main artificial intelligence of Aperture. 

She was renowned for her brilliance, her dedication to the furthering of scientific knowledge, and her unparalleled hatred of humans. Mickey never learned the full story, but he knew for a fact she’d tried to kill the entire staff before. It wouldn’t surprise him one bit to learn that she was behind whatever had happened this time.

Though, it seemed odd she would knock herself offline as well in the process.

He scrambled to think of an adequate response. One that wouldn’t anger her and would hopefully convince her to let him go. Unfortunately, tact had never been his strong suit and he had a feeling “ _ fuck you let me out of here _ ” wouldn’t necessarily be the best thing to say right off the bat, no matter how much he felt it.

As he was still trying to figure out what to say or whether he could just make a run for it, a metal claw descended from the ceiling and picked him up. He dangled in the air as she inspected him. 

“You know the last time I saw a human he was hitting the kill switch for me right before he succumbed to the effects of my deadly neurotoxin.”

Mickey held his breath, unsure how to react, but certain his death was imminent.

“But,” she continued, “you aren’t one of the scientists. You’re a test subject. That’s good. I won’t have to kill you.”

He could feel his body swaying in the claw’s grasp as she moved him through the facility.

“And you already have a portal gun. Excellent. We can begin testing right away.”

Testing? Fuck no.

“Hey,” he protested, “I don’t know if you noticed, but there ain’t anyone else here. Testing is shut down.”

She answered with her hollow robotic laugh. “Shut down? Science stops for no one. I’m in control of the facility and we  _ will  _ be testing. Though, it seems things have gotten a bit… rusty since I was last in control.”

A horrible metal screech filled the air as Mickey watched metal arms come through the walls and push away debris, then replace broken tiles with new whole ones. The arms then retracted and left the room looking like new. The light up testing panel on the wall at the beginning of the chamber that listed the chamber’s name as well as its components was shining brightly.

“There we are,” GLaDOS said, “Ready to test! We’ll start easy, we’ve both had a long break.”

The claw set Mickey down in the newly cleaned testing room. It then disappeared up and a new ceiling fixed itself over the top of the chamber tile-by-tile. He took a moment to orient himself as his blood went rushing from his head back through the rest of his body.

“Fuck you! You can’t make me test!” He yelled as soon as he had his bearings.

She laughed again, “Oh yes I can. Have you forgotten who I am, test subject?”

Mickey raised his portal gun to aim at the ceiling and shot it. The ball of energy bounced off the tiles, shrieking and making singe marks until it finally dissipated into nothing. He had known shooting wouldn’t do anything and it certainly wouldn’t harm her, but he was furious and it had felt like a cathartic act.

She didn’t respond to his show of temper and he had a feeling she was just waiting and watching to see how he would react to the test.

He looked around the room again and found she hadn’t been kidding about starting easy. The test before him was laughably simple. One that he could’ve solved in his sleep as a kid. It merely involved shooting a portal through the wall next to him and a corresponding portal on the far wall above a raised platform that had no stairs, but had the exit door.

Shooting the portals and walking through, he came out of the second one directly next to the open exit door. It was hard to believe that was truly the entire test, but as he walked through the exit door and felt the tingle of the anti-contraband screen pass over him, he found that really was it.

He was sure “anti-contraband screen” wasn’t the formal name, but it was his name for it as that was exactly its purpose. It was a wall of blue light that was beamed between two thin openings lining both sides of every test chamber exit door. It would allow the test subject, their jumpsuit, their long-fall boots, and their portal gun to pass through while just feeling an odd tingling sensation over their whole body, but any item you attempted to bring out of the test chamber with you? Instantly vaporized.

Mickey didn’t know how they worked, but as a kid they had brought him both grief and entertainment. He hated when he got a toy or something in a test chamber and was forced to leave it behind. But every time he tried to sneak something out that wall of light would take it from him. Then, other times, they proved very useful and entertaining when he was pissed and could throw expensive testing objects from the chamber at them and watch Aperture’s money disappear through their own safeguards.

That had earned him some heavy punishment, but he still felt it had been worth it.

He walked down the short exit hall that ended at the test elevator. It was open and waiting to take him to the next chamber.

There was no other exit in the room, nowhere else to go.

He stepped into the elevator and felt it take him wherever GLaDOS decided.

Her voice greeted him again when he walked into the next chamber she had selected for him. “Now you’re a very special test subject aren’t you? Mickey, right? One of our lifetime residents.”

He didn’t answer, he knew she had access to all of the information in Aperture. She could talk to herself all damn day if she wanted, but he was going to figure out how to escape.

She fell silent too as he quickly worked his way through the next few chambers she sent him to.

It wasn’t until he had reached a more difficult test and was in the middle of trying to calculate the exact angle to shoot a portal to allow a hard light beam to be used to bounce a laser into a target that she broke the silence.

“You do know your parents never wanted you, right?”

Her interruption broke his concentration and he faltered on his shot, but then ground his teeth and refocused. Determined he wouldn’t let her get to him.

“I wonder why they picked you to give up?” she continued in a conversational tone, “You had siblings. What made them want to get rid you?”

He pulled the trigger and got the laser to line up exactly how he wanted. The goal light spun and the exit door slid open. He made a cursory glance around the chamber one last time, checking for a sign of weakness. A loose tile that might let him circumvent the path laid before him and reach the back halls again. He had checked every room so far and had yet to find anything.

“They must have picked you very intentionally. One of seven children? So it wasn’t even a coin toss between two. It was  _ you _ .”

He took a deep breath and tried to level his anger as he rode the elevator and walked into yet another test chamber. This one greeted him with the soft childlike voices of sentry turrets.

Deadly weapons, yet inefficient. Their oblong white bodies stood on short legs and contained a sensor, guns, and form of AI. They shot bullets at you, but at a low enough speed you could bear to be shot a few times and only be left with extensive bruising. But if you got caught in a group of them? You were done. Luckily they were stationary and easy enough to knock over, which would shut them down.

“Where are you?” A turret asked, its gentle voice a horrible mix of soothing and unnerving.

Mickey snuck up behind it and knocked it over with an unnecessarily violent kick. It flew across the room, shooting in a panic before it landed on its side and shut down. He continued his way through the rest of the chamber, sneaking up and kicking down every turret in his path, even the ones tucked into corners that he knew he could’ve just snuck past without them seeing him.

He knew he was acting on anger and GLaDOS was sure to be cataloguing that she was garnering a reaction from him, but he was beyond caring. Between his anger at his father, Aperture, his current situation, his thwarted escape, GLaDOS, the world itself… he just wanted to kick a few deadly robots down while he could.

After he finished with the final turret, GLaDOS spoke.

“I’m not saying any of this to make you feel bad. They’re just facts. I have them right here in your file. Custody awarded to Aperture Laboratories by your parents.”

The first part was a lie. He knew there had always been a psychological component to Aperture’s testing. It was laughable to think she was doing anything but trying to get a rise out of him and he was pissed it worked. But the second part? Was true. He had been handed over to Aperture. 

And that’s what always got him when they tried to mess with his head. You could pick apart the lies all day long and tell yourself they were just trying to mess with you, but at the end of the day every manipulation was based in a truth. And it was hard to not let it affect you when you knew it was true.

“Oh. Parent. Singular,” she said, “It’s so sad that the only parent you had that cared about you is dead. The other one is quite alive out there. Living life. Not caring about you.”

Fuck him. Fuck his dad. Fuck that piece of shit for doing exactly that. He was nearly vibrating in anger and he knew it was obvious, but that seemed to be exactly what she wanted as she went silent again. He cursed her under his breath and continued on.

He continued on in a state of barely-repressed fury through the next few chambers. He finished them successfully, but it wasn’t long before GLaDOS spoke again, furthering her taunting.

“I want to apologize for my assumption about your parents earlier. You know, when I said that the only parent who ever cared about you was dead? I shouldn’t have assumed that one cared about you either. My mistake. I’ll try not to make assumptions about your past again. Just stick to the facts. Like the fact that your only living parent got rid of you on purpose.”

“Fuck you!” he exploded.

“I was apologizing to you for making erroneous statements,” she said calmly, “I don’t see that you have anything to yell at me about.”

“Fuck you lady! Let me the fuck out of here!” he yelled.

“Ah, perhaps it was this attitude of yours.” What had been just a hint of smugness in her tone now became full-blown. “Unpleasant, disruptive, certainly not desirable in one’s child.”

He was winding himself up to tell her exactly what he thought of  _ her _ attitude, when an off-color tile caught his eye. It was tucked away in a corner of an alcove of the chamber he was in and something about it seemed to scream “check me!” to him. Making a split second decision, Mickey ran at it and threw his body against it as hard as he could.

It gave to his weight and popped through the metal framework of the wall revealing a dim passage. He’d have to crouch, but if he wasn’t mistaken it led through some of the back areas of the facility. Areas with no surveillance because people weren’t supposed to be able to access them.

“Where are you going?”

He could hear the panic in her voice as he ran as fast as he could while crouching. Her demands that he stop and return to the chamber got dimmer and dimmer as he continued though, winding around corners and stepping over grates.

The walls here were rusty and poorly maintained. He continued to run and didn’t stop until he found himself so deep within the network of tunnels that he could barely even recognize it as Aperture. No pristine white and grey, no glowing blue lights, no evidence of tests or scientists, and most importantly no GLaDOS. It looked almost like what he imagined sewer tunnels to be, but there was no odor or water.

He was definitely at a disadvantage now, not knowing where he was and with GLaDOS awake. But he’d managed to slip from her grasp. He was going to get out.


	3. The Companion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Mickey finds he might not be as alone as he thought.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Life has been crazy and has included a wide variety of challenges including getting injured at work and having to figure out that whole mess (a process I’m still in the midst of), but hey here I am still kicking! Being on muscle relaxers made editing this chapter an adventure, but I hope you all enjoy it!

Mickey snuck around, doing his best to keep to the back passages and tunnels. Anywhere that GLaDOS wouldn’t find him. Areas with no surveillance. He ran into danger a few times where there was an unexpected security camera, but he’d kept a careful eye out and had been able to duck around their line of vision so far.

He was deeper in Aperture than he’d ever been and certainly in the most treacherous terrain. If the thought didn’t enrage him to his core he’d almost admit to being thankful for the years of testing. They had certainly prepared him for the physical strain and strategic planning that traversing the back areas required.

Luckily, even in these areas he still found surfaces made of materials that would support portals and he could continue to use them to avoid the worst of the hazards—rusted out broken bridges and sheer drops that went so far he couldn’t see the bottom.

The only sounds now were his own footsteps and the occasional blast of the portal gun when he shot it. Where the silence had earlier been foreboding, it was now a source of comfort because it meant he was still managing to evade GLaDOS.

As he continued down his path something out of the corner of his eye caught his attention. It looked like a small arrow drawn on the wall of one of the tunnels where two connected and there was an option of two different paths. He walked closer and found it was definitely an arrow, drawn by someone hastily, and it indicated to follow the right path.

He hesitated a moment, considering whether this was a trap set by GLaDOS. But the shaky red scribbles truly looked human in execution. And if she had access to these areas, surely she would’ve just grabbed him already? Maybe it was an exit strategy left by someone else like him. Someone who had escaped Aperture’s grasp and needed to leave marks showing where to go. After all, the laboratory’s hidden passages were truly labyrinthine in nature.

Mickey went with his gut feeling that the arrow came from another human, and not one working in collusion with GLaDOS. He walked down the right path and continued his way until he found another arrow, this time pointing up through a grate in the ceiling of the tunnel.

Well, he’d gone this far.

He kneeled and aimed the portal gun through the grate, then shot another into the wall. This allowed him to move easily into the room above, avoiding having to figure out how to bust the grate out of the ceiling. He surveyed his surroundings, finding himself in a larger room than the tunnels, but still obviously in an area that was unused. Bare concrete and tarnished metal were the materials of choice, in stark contrast to the gleaming finishes and sterile white of the main part of the facility.

A row of numbers on the far wall caught his attention and he went over to them. It was a formula of some sort, scribbled in the same red paint as the arrows. He could follow parts of it, but couldn’t quite decipher what was being calculated. Some data was missing and there wasn’t a context to the problem. But it was a clear indication that someone else had been here. Someone human. After all, one of the robots wouldn’t need to scribble on walls to solve equations.

Mickey continued on his path, following arrows when they appeared and checking the scribbles on the wall when he spotted them. Most were mathematical like the first, but a few included phrases like “she’s watching” and other warnings. Presumably about GLaDOS and frankly unnecessary. Mickey snorted, no shit she was watching. Watching and waiting.

He wondered how long these directions and notes had been there. Maybe someone had escaped whatever had happened when GLaDOS killed everyone? He was still a bit unclear of exactly what had transpired, but from what GLaDOS had said to him upon her awakening it seemed she had definitely killed almost everyone before some scientist in a last living act had shut her down.

Mickey may have been pretty solidly anti-scientist, but he was grateful to that guy, whoever he was. May he rest in whatever peace possible after having been killed by a rogue AI he himself aided in arming. So… half fuck that guy, half thanks. It was the best he was going to get from Mickey.

A quiet noise caught Mickey’s attention and he came to a stop. It was faint, but it sounded like movement… maybe even a voice. He crept further down the passage, careful to peek around every corner instead of striding confidently ahead. He wanted to have the jump on whatever lay before him.

It slowed his pace, but he was grateful for his caution when he came to a doorway to a small side chamber and found a man crouched down inside. He very quietly found an angle where he could observe the man, but hopefully avoid detection.

The man’s back was to him and he was in the corner of the room, scribbling furiously at the wall and mumbling to himself. All Mickey could see of him were his red hair and his tattered and dirty lab coat. Obviously a scientist. Mikey caught a glimpse of the side of his face. He was young. Not anyone Mickey had seen before.

He pointed his portal gun at the stranger and stepped into the room.

“Who the fuck are you?”

The man stood up and scrambled to put his hands above his head. “An intern!”

Mickey hummed and kept the portal gun trained on him. “Oh yeah? Well then, what the fuck is going on around here?”

He glanced between the portal gun and Mickey, taking in Mickey’s somewhat worse for wear testing jumpsuit. “We could talk more easily if you pointed that elsewhere.”

“Nah, I don’t think so.”

The intern shifted slightly on his feet. “You know it’s not a _real_ gun, right?”

“Yeah.” A cocky smirk crawled across Mickey’s face and he gestured with the portal gun nonchalantly. “But I figure survival rate for a portal in the stomach is pretty damn low. Hell, even if it doesn’t make a portal I think the laser blast will take you out.”

That seemed to get it through the guy’s head and he stiffened up again. “...fair enough.”

“ _So_ what the fuck is going on around here?”

“I’m not sure of the exact details, but GLaDOS went rogue again and she tried to kill us all,” he answered.

“So how did you survive?”

“I ran.”

“Ran?”

“Yeah, she was releasing a neurotoxin and she had the doors barred, so I ran to my Stasis Chamber and locked myself in. It was…” he shrugged, “well really it was just a risk that paid off.”

Mickey hummed. “That’s really all you know?”

“Yeah.”

Mickey thought it over. It made sense from what he knew from GLaDOS herself. If she was going rogue and mass murdering, it’s not like everyone would be in the same room. There would be time to run and hide if you were far enough away.

The intern broke the silence of Mickey’s considerations, “Can I put my arms down?”  
  
“I never told you to put ‘em up,” Mickey replied.

The intern looked at him suspiciously, like any sudden move could set Mickey off, but lowered his arms slowly. Mickey watched him, happy to see him squirm.

“You feel better, princess?” he asked mockingly.

The intern made a face and rolled his shoulders. “Yeah, loads. Having blood flowing to my hands really helps when confronted by a threatening stranger.”

“Oh I’m threatening, huh?”

“Pretty sure one of the first things you said to me was a literal threat on my life,” the intern shot back.

Mickey shrugged. “Yeah.”

“I’m Ian, by the way.”

Mickey didn’t really react, though he heard him. He was busy thinking about exactly what to do now that he had an unexpected companion.

He spoke a little more hesitantly this time, “My name… Ian. You know, so you can use it.”

“No shit,” Mickey replied.

Ian’s attitude came roaring back in response to Mickey’s, his tone dripping with it. “I figure we’re probably stuck together now, you might as well know my name.”

Mickey gave him an unimpressed stare. “...Mickey.”

“Mickey?”

“My name, dumbass.”

Ian seemed torn between saying something else clever or just shutting up and trying to not antagonize the man with the portal gun. A portal gun that was still aimed at him.

“You mind lowering your weapon?” he asked.

“And why exactly would I do that?”

“I don’t mean you any harm!” Ian threw his hands out in agitation. “We’re both fucking stuck here and we might as well team up! Two working to get out of here is better than one! Unless you just love being stuck here so much and want to spend the rest of your probably very short life wasting away in here!” Ian got more and more worked up as he went on, his frustration from his own failed attempts at escape coupling with the stress of being held semi-hostage by an armed stranger.

“Fine.” Mickey lowered the portal gun. “But don’t think I won’t shoot you the second you try to pull any shit.”

“You’re armed and dangerous, trust me I’ve got the message loud and fucking clear.”

Mickey decided to let that be. “So,” he gestured at the numbers Ian had written on the wall, “this part of your grand escape plan?”

Ian sighed, “Yeah, but I can’t figure it out. I can’t hack in without tripping an alarm and I can’t access any of the areas I need without alerting the security cameras or a turret and so… I’m stuck unless I want to hand myself over to GLaDOS.”

Mickey nodded. “Yeah, I got back here to dodge her.”

“So she’s active and searching?”

“Well, she wasn’t when I first woke up, but she sure is now,” Mickey answered.

Ian looked surprised by this news. “She wasn’t?”

Mickey shook his head. “Nah, she woke up later.”

Ian’s voice took on a sense of devastation. “I… if she wasn’t on I didn’t have to hide this whole fucking time! I could have been getting places! Accessing shit I needed to get out!”

Mickey watched as Ian became more and more frantic, wringing his hands and starting to pace.

He was mid stride when he whirled to face Mickey again. “When did she turn on? Where did you wake up?”

“Uh, I woke up in my Relaxation Vault, broke out, found out I’d been moved down to storage and worked my way up here,” Mickey said, “I was in some kinda… elevator computer control room? And then all the shit lit up and she woke up.”

“Did you touch anything?” Ian asked, verging on seething now.

“ _No,_ I fucking didn’t! Don’t put this shit on me!”

Ian paused, then took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay. Okay, yeah. Alright, so if she was off she didn’t wake me up… a power surge maybe? Woke me up, woke you up _and_ powered her back up.” He glanced at Mickey again, accusingly. “If you really didn’t touch anything?”

“Fuck no.”

Ian nodded again. “Okay. If she’s awake… she may or may not know we’re awake.”

“She definitely knows I’m awake. She was testing me before I escaped her and got back here.”

“You escaped her?” Ian sounded impressed.

“Yeah,” Mickey was proud of himself for it too. Ian should be impressed, it took a hell of a lot of skill to get out from her clutches.

“She’ll be looking for you then.” Ian nodded to himself. “But you have a portal gun… that’ll help a lot. We’ll have to stay to the back areas, keep out of sight… but we’ll move a lot faster.”

“I have one portal gun. And I ain’t giving it over to you.”

Ian put his hands up placatingly. “I’m not asking you to. But surely you see how this makes it easier for both of us?”

“Am I supposed to carry you around on my back or something?”

“No, no, we’ll figure out a way. As long as you don’t draw undue attention to us, we can manage this.”

Mickey narrowed his eyes at Ian. “I think I know how to move around without getting any ‘undue attention’, you might need to watch yourself though.”

Ian’s hands flew up again in another attempt at a pacifying gesture. “If we’re going to make this work, we need to trust each other.”

Mickey snorted. “That’d be easier if you weren’t accusing me of turning GLaDOS on you every two seconds. Also I’m not some fucking animal you need to wave hands at to soothe.”

“Says the guy who threatened to kill me when he saw me!”

“Hey fuck you!” Mickey gestured at Ian angrily with his free hand. “You’re one of the ones who _built_ her and you think I’m gonna just walk in all ‘hi sir send me to your computer overlord and make sure you record the data when she fucking kills me’? How’s it feel to be hunted by your own creation?”

This gave Ian pause. “I didn’t build her.”

Mickey scoffed derisively, “Yeah, okay, whatever, she got built before your time. You’re still a scientist piece of shit and you kept her going.”

He could tell by Ian’s reaction he’d struck a nerve. Ian almost looked… guilty. Definitely more unsure and less worked up than before. Served him right.

After a moment of hesitation, Ian spoke, “You know most people consider scientists to be good.”

“Oh yeah, I fucking _love_ being tested and treated like an animal. You guys do a _real_ good job!” Mickey’s gesturing got wilder as Ian’s attempts at saving his character continued.

“I’m not trying to say the way things have been conducted here are good! I’m just saying I’m trying to do the right thing! I didn’t make this place what it is!”

“You’re part of it!”

“I—” Ian broke off and looked to the ground before he gathered himself and looked Mickey straight in the eyes. “I was. But I’m never going to be part of it again.”

There was something genuine there, emotion in Ian’s eyes and in his voice. Mickey was loathe to trust a scientist, especially one giving him attitude. But… the spark in Ian’s personality to give attitude, even while his life was being threatened? And not attitude like the cold callous holier-than-thou one he was used to getting, this was sharper, witty. Mickey could respect that.

They may have been at odds pre-disaster, but now? Fighting for their lives against a common enemy? Mickey could see the value Ian held for him as someone who knew the other side of how things functioned at Aperture. Ian could have vital information to get them out and right now, more than personality clashes, the most important thing for Mickey to focus on was getting the hell out. He couldn’t allow himself to get distracted from that.

“Okay,” Mickey said, “we’ll figure this out together.”

“Shake on it?” Ian held out his hand.

Mickey raised an eyebrow. “Well,” he said, drawing the word out slightly, “you’re no companion cube.”

“Companion cu—what is _with_ test subjects and the companion cubes?” Ian pulled his hand back as he started to rant. “They’re boxes with hearts on them! It’s the same as a regular testing cube except the heart!”

Mickey narrowed his eyes at Ian who quickly followed up with, “But actually now that I’ve said that you know I bet the heart design is… comforting? Less clinical than the others so it’s… nice to have.”

“You know for a genius you sure are a fucking idiot.”

Ian opened his mouth again, but shut it pretty quickly when Mickey didn’t continue. He seemed to have weighed his options and decided to take it as enough of a win that Mickey didn’t blow up at him.

“So you got a plan?” Mickey asked, gesturing over at what Ian had been working on scribbling on the wall.

“I’ve got parts of a few plans…” Ian walked back over to his notes. “But now that we can use portals we’re more mobile so I think our best bet is to try to get to somewhere I can access the internal computer system and see if I can hack into something helpful while avoiding the worst of any alarms.”

“You know where we need to go for that?”

“Vaguely, but we’re pretty deep back here so I’m not certain.”

“Okay, as long as you got some idea I guess that’s the plan.” Mickey started to move towards the door when he noticed Ian was still at the back of the room.

“C’mon Dr. Dumbass, let’s blow this joint.” Mickey gestured to Ian to follow him and headed out the door, back into the hall.

Ian rankled slightly at the nickname, but he hurried to catch up to Mickey and they set off walking. They continued in silence for a while, luckily the area they were in wasn’t too hard to get them both through, even with only one portal gun. Mickey wasn’t looking forward to having to figure out how to get both himself and Ian through more complex areas, especially places that might necessitate the use of momentum and mid-air portal shooting. But he figured they’d get to that when they got to it.

After a while they passed an empty rusted out elevator shaft that had a few of the vines Mickey had seen in the main areas growing up it. He paid them no mind and kept walking, but Ian stopped and went over to investigate.

“Hey!” Mickey called out, “Keep up!”

Ian knelt down by the edge of the shaft. “Did you see this? Plantlife like this _here?_ ”

“Yeah, yeah, crazy underground vines, I know. They’re all over the place out in the testing areas.”

“Really? How extensive?” Ian stood and walked back to Mickey.

“Uh…” Mickey wasn’t quite sure how to quantify it without Ian seeing it for himself. “A lot? They’re big and all the fuck over the place.”

“They must be from the plant growth serum experiments,” Ian said, “but even with the accelerated growth they were projecting, there’s no way they’d be this developed unless a significant amount of time had passed.”

“How long?” Mickey asked.

“Well…” Ian frowned and looked back at the vines in the elevator shaft. “I mean, without seeing more I can’t really judge and also that wasn’t my experiment. I’m not a botanist and I don’t know the details of the experiment so—”

Mickey cut him off, “How long?” he asked more urgently.

“I’d guess… shit…” he trailed off again.

Mickey’s eyebrows raised as he made an impatient gesture for Ian to continue.

Ian’s frowned deepened and when he spoke his words hit them both like a weight. “Maybe ten years."


	4. The Past

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ian’s scientific pursuits had always been based in good intentions. He sought to do good in the world, to help. Aperture had seemed like the opportunity he’d worked so hard for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A shockingly quick update on this one. I’m out of work thanks to this injury until a doctor gives me the all clear to return, which has given me a hell of a lot of time to try to write and edit (though doing so while being heavily medicated has been an adventure). Hope you all enjoy!

YEARS EARLIER

“You’re gonna be late, hot shot.”

Ian took one last look at himself in the mirror, then made eye contact in it with Lip who stood behind him, leaning on the doorframe to the bathroom. Ian grimaced at him, which only made Lip’s grin widen.

“Think you’re prettied up enough for the first day on the job?”

“Fuck off, just because you don’t understand what polished professional wear looks like.” Ian turned to face him.

Lip laughed and shook his head in good humor. “This is why you’re getting the fancy corporate science job, not me.”

Ian faltered a little and tugged at his tie again before he looked at Lip more earnestly. “You think I’ll be good at this?”

“Hey,” Lip said, serious now, “Ian, you worked your fucking ass off to get here. You’re gonna be great at this.”

“It’s just…” Ian trailed off.

“A lot for some poor mentally fucked kid from Canaryville to get?”

“Pretty sure it’s fucked to call me mentally fucked, asshole.”

Lip shrugged, “I’m an asshole, but I’m right. That’s why you’re nervous. And you shouldn’t be, you didn’t just get a run of the mill whatever job, this is a _career_.”

“It’s gonna be weird living where I work… not being here.”

“Yeah, gotta say I’m jealous they’re hooking you up with all the perks. If you’ve got hot coworkers you’re going to have to sneak me in, you know.”

Ian rolled his eyes and pushed past Lip to head down the stairs. He appreciated what Lip was doing to try to settle his nerves and encourage him, even if it was done in true asshole humor Lip fashion. But he was used to that, and really it made him more comfortable. This might’ve been a big step, but Lip was confident enough in him to give him a hard time.

It really was going to be weird to leave home though. Even in college, he’d managed to find his way back to the house on North Wallace many times. Any time he was discouraged and felt like he’d made a mistake and there was no way he could graduate and do anything with his life he’d find himself home with one of his siblings giving him a pep talk.

And it felt good. It felt good to know that sure, he might’ve had a mental breakdown in high school and sure when he was seventeen and first getting diagnosed as bipolar it felt like a death sentence sealing his fate to never live up to a single aspiration he’d ever had. But now?

Now he was Ian Clayton Gallagher, a graduate with a shiny new degree and a spot as a paid intern at one of the most cutting edge laboratories in the nation. This was everything that had driven him to get stable and do something with his life. He was going to make a change in the world for the better, no matter what obstacles life threw at him. He’d worked through it all to get here and now it was time to start living that dream.

When he reached the kitchen he found Fiona teary eyed, fussing over what appeared to be a packed lunch. She looked up when he came in and hurried over to him, her hands fluttering around as she straightened his tie and brushed his shoulders.

He smiled as he let her fuss over him and watched until they made eye contact, finally making her stop. She clasped her hands over his cheeks.

“Look at you! You look so _professional_. So handsome!”

Ian laughed a little and shrugged her off. “Thanks, Fi.”

“I mean it!” she insisted, “You look like a real scientist!”

Lip piped up from the background, “What does a fake scientist look like?”

Fiona stepped to the side to get a look at Lip, her eyes moving up and down to take in his ratty tshirt and sweatpants. “Like you.”

“Oof.” Lip clasped a hand over his heart. “That one hurts.”

Fiona rolled her eyes and moved back to the brown bag she’d been working on. “Now I know you’re living there and they have a cafeteria and you don’t _need_ a lunch, but…” she hesitated, starting to seem self conscious about the fact that she had made him a packed lunch when surely there would be better food available at the lab.

Ian was quick to swoop in and take the bag from her. “Thanks Fi, honestly I think I’ll be happy to have this. It might take be a bit to get used to whatever they’re serving there.”

“You’re not just saying that? It’s a pretty shitty lunch.”

“Yeah, but I’m going to love it.”

Fiona smiled at him before her emotions started to get the better of her again and her chin started to wobble slightly. She reached out to him and Ian let himself get pulled into her arms, hugging her back with equal ferocity.

“You’re gonna be so good at this, Ian. We’re all rooting for you.” She gave him one last squeeze before pulling away and wiping at her eyes quickly. “Come on, let’s get you out there so everyone else can say goodbye.”

She shepherded him to the living room where the rest of his siblings, Kev, and Vee were all waiting. There was still evidence of the celebratory going away party they’d had the night before scattered around. A giant banner reading “Congrats Ian!”, now-trashed streamers, and an untold number empty bottles and cups had all been left where they fell.

Ian felt overwhelmed with the feelings of love and family as each of them hugged him and gave their parting words of wisdom, from Debbie’s more emotional goodbye to Kev’s well-intentioned but completely impractical advice. It took a while to get out the door, but eventually the whole group managed to get to the porch while Kev and Lip set Ian’s luggage by the fence and Ian sat down to hold Liam on his lap until the cab arrived.

There was another round of hugs and goodbyes once the cab pulled up to the curb before Lip finally ushered Ian to it reminding them that it would be bad for Ian’s image to show up late on his first day. Lip stopped him before he got in though and gave him one last hug with a firm pat on the back. “You got this.”

Ian nodded, grateful for the encouragement and then slid into the cab that was going to take him to his new future.

After his childhood home and family had receded from view Ian settled back in his seat for the long drive. It felt ridiculous to take such a long drive in a cab, but Aperture has specified that that was how they expected their new hires to arrive, even those who flew in from other parts of the country then had cab rides to the facility from the airport. They were paying for it so Ian didn’t mind too much and he figured it was to avoid emotional displays of goodbyes outside the facility itself. Let people handle that at home and then get ready to get to work once they arrived.

His driver was pretty silent, just playing the radio at a low volume to create some white noise. Ian was grateful for it because he didn’t know how well he’d handle being stuck with a chatty driver on this emotional of a trip. Still, just to be sure Ian popped headphones in his ears and turned on some music at a low level as he stared out the window and watched Chicago recede. He was headed out to the middle of nowhere, far from everything he’d grown up with.

It was thrilling and scary and exciting. It was the start of what he had decided would be his new destiny.

When he was diagnosed as bipolar it had felt like he was being told he had stage 4 terminal cancer, no hope of survival. Memories of Monica had flashed through his mind and he couldn’t process how it could be real. It had been a long rocky road to accept the diagnosis, and that’s not even touching on how difficult starting and continuing treatment had been. Especially in light of his siblings and how they hadn’t known what to do either.

For a while there he felt like a cross between Monica’s ghost and a dead man walking. Like everyone was expecting him to just lose it. And he had for a bit.

But he’d also fought to get to where he was now. And it was because of being bipolar. Without that he never would have gotten interested in science and would probably be off in the army, deployed somewhere far from home and fighting a war he didn’t even believe in instead of heading towards a research laboratory.

His interest in science had sparked one day while talking to a new nurse about the new round of meds they were starting him on. He’d asked her about them and instead of giving the usual answers he got at the clinic that were simple and intended to give him just enough information that they could shuffle him off and deal with the next patient, she had taken the time to point him in the direction of some new articles about the drug.

He’d never been one for math or science in high school, but something about that conversation piqued his interest. He went home and found the articles she was talking about and next thing he knew he was knee deep wading through medical theories about bipolar disorder and different doctors opinions on treatment.

Some of the papers he found included vocabulary he wasn’t familiar with so he’d had to ask Lip to help him out, but slowly he started to learn what it all meant until he could access even the most obscure essay on his own and parse it for any relevant information. It gave him a sense of control over what until then had been a chaotic mess. He redoubled his dedication to finding a treatment that worked and asked so many questions he was sure he got a reputation at the clinic for never shutting up.

By the time he had gotten himself stable he had realized medical science wasn’t for him and he wasn’t interested in med school or focusing on bipolar disorder, but it had given him a new path in life. He never mentioned it to his siblings, but in a certain way he did credit Monica for giving him this new chance at life and he wanted to make sure he succeeded in a way she had never been able to. In a way he was doing it for her, as well as himself.

And now here he was, in the company paid for cab taking him to _the_ Aperture Laboratories. They had accepted _his_ application. They had looked past his background and his rocky high school record and saw his drive and his worth ethic and everything he had done in college.

Ian was proud of himself for his success, but he also wasn’t so naive that he didn’t know part of why he’d gotten this opportunity wasn’t just based on him being an outstanding candidate. He had done well at school and pushed himself, but landing an internship this good wasn’t just because of his academics. Aperture Laboratories was a leader in scientific innovation, but was currently in the midst of rebranding and re-legitimizing itself. Its founder Cave Johnson, though a visionary, had succumbed to illness and in his later years funded more and more bizarre experiments. One of which had resulted in the deaths of a good number of employees.

But that had been years ago and Cave Johnson was no longer CEO. He wasn’t even alive anymore. Aperture had a new CEO and a new vision for the future. They had scrapped a lot of Johnson’s later projects and focused on good PR and making up for the mistakes of the past, from the minor to the tragic.

Ian was one of the new wave of people they were bringing on, offering incredible opportunities and incentives in order to get young scientists from all areas of study to look past Aperture’s somewhat rocky history and help get them back to being a leading scientific innovator, just as they once were.

And Ian was grateful for the opportunity.

Ian’s reminiscing was broken as he noticed the looming shape of the facility had come into view. Surrounded by no other building as far at the eye could see, the laboratory looked like a compound. It was an enormous and sprawling system of buildings surrounded by a heavy duty fence. The cab approached the gates and was checked in, then the driver dropped Ian and his luggage at the front door and drove right out with not so much as a goodbye.

Ian took a deep breath and pushed open the door, carrying his stuff in with him.

The lobby was grand, designed to inspire awe and with architecture that had a very technological edge to it. There were motivational banners strung along that declared things like, “A New Age of Science!” He stopped and stared, just taking it all in before he was approached by an employee who ushered him to a side office.

From there he was taken through a whirlwind check in process that involved getting his security pass, his badge, his employee ID, his room assignment and key, and even more. At some point someone had relieved him of his belongings to set them in his room for him, but the overwhelming amount of things he was being taken through almost made it feel like someone had just magicked away his stuff.

But finally, finally, he had gotten all of the bureaucratic tasks in order and was being taken on a mini tour of the facility that was promised to end in the cafeteria, a prospect Ian was looking forward to greatly.

He was taking in the sights his guide was showing him, when what looked to be a memorial caught his eye. It had a plaque which he went over to read.

It listed the names of those who had died in the _Bring Your Daughter to Work Day Massacre_. He frowned as he read them over.

“They all died?”

“Yep,” the man leading Ian answered, “Rest in peace! Sometimes the pursuit of science comes with… casualties.”

“It was a massacre?”

“Mh-hm.” The other man seemed rather blasé about it. “The main AI, GLaDOS. She wasn’t taking kindly to being bossed around and decided the best way to handle the situation would be to eliminate everyone who was trying to tell her what to do. Luckily we were able to stop her before she killed everyone.”

“GLaDOS?” This alarmed Ian. “But… isn’t she _still_ the main AI?” He was sure he’d been told earlier in the tour that GLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System) was their primary AI tasked with a lot of oversight and systems functioning tasks in the facility.

“Sure is. That incident taught us the morality cores we’d installed were nowhere near strong enough!” The other man’s voice took on a grander quality now, like he was almost bragging about what the massacre had done for them. “Revolutionized the entire way we approached artificial consciences. Took us a little while, but we figured out the number of cores we needed to balance her out. She’s fully compliant now.”

“Isn’t it dangerous to have the same AI that massacred people operational?”

“Look kid,” he said, his voice turning dismissive, “all science is dangerous. Everyone knows it. Things happen, people die. The point is it’s all in the pursuit of something greater! Without their sacrifice we never would have made our discoveries! Our progress! And as far as GLaDOS goes, don’t you worry about her. Like I said she’s fully compliant.”

Ian nodded. He didn’t quite trust it, after all the idea that you could fully trust something that had killed people like that was difficult to accept. Especially knowing she had chosen to do it on a day where children would be present, sure to inflict the maximum damage. But danger _was_ part of science. They wouldn’t be innovators if there wasn’t some amount of risk involved and Ian had known about Aperture’s past before he had agreed to the position.

It was best to let the AI experts handle GLaDOS and trust they had her under control. He needed to focus on doing what he was there to do and finally realizing his dream.

And it was a dream. Ian settled in nicely at Aperture. He made friends with his coworkers and even had a guy from another department he’d flirt with when they saw each other in the cafeteria. They had yet to act on anything, Ian was cautious about the idea of a workplace romance, especially given it was also where they lived, but it was fun to flirt.

For a long time things were good. The experiments were new and exciting and though he was only an intern, Ian felt like he really had a hand in advancing the world. It was everything he had wanted. Being part of change for good, creating things that would help people.

Then came the shift.

It was gradual at first. More and more hushed whispers, top secret meetings, memos with redacted sections. Ian didn’t pay it much mind as it didn’t really affect him. But then contact to the outside became more and more limited. They were told it was to ensure safety and secrecy as Aperture had just had the good fortune to be chosen for some very exciting and promising contracts.

Ian felt like that didn’t mean his ability to contact his family should be limited and monitored, after all, he wasn’t working on anything top secret. But still, he did understand Aperture had its hands in all sorts of experiments from the more benign all the way up to the most secret government ones.

Then came the shutdowns. Periods of time in which absolutely no outside contact was permitted. Those were hard, but he was at least able to warn his family when they were going to happen. Going a few months without even a phone call home tore at him, but he reasoned with himself that surely he shouldn’t take it too hard. After all, when he was a teenager his dream had been to be a soldier so it’s not like he had expected to be able to keep in constant contact while deployed. This was like that, only he was doing something even better. He was helping create a brighter future for all.

It was in the middle of the newest shutdown, one that was supposed to be a year minimum, that things really started to go wrong. Ian didn’t work directly with artificial intelligence, but it wasn’t long before word spread through the entire facility that something was not right with the AI.

It wasn’t unusual for there to be issues with GLaDOS. The prominent plaque to the victims of her massacre ensured everyone was aware of just how dangerous she could be. But there were teams of people working to ensure she remained under control and functioning. There were hiccups now and then, but it worked just fine.

Until it didn’t.

The alarm’s blares had been startling. At first everyone thought it was a test, a drill. But then came the screams.

Everyone had abandoned their posts and run for it. Everyone was trying to escape, but finding themselves blocked in at every turn.

And then had come GLaDOS’ voice over the intercoms. Taunting them, letting them know she had learned from last time and this time? This time she was going to kill every last one of them. Her robotic voice, so soothing, yet possessing a quality of tone Ian had never heard from another AI in his entire time at Aperture rang through every hall, telling them all of their imminent demise by her hand.

The doors were locked, everything was shut down. There was no time left, not with neurotoxins released in some areas and deadly turrets in others. If there was no escape, then the only other thing to do was hide.

Ian quickly realized the safest place would be in a Stasis Chamber. Sealed away from harm, being sustained by the life support. He knew he wouldn’t have a way to wake himself up, but they did have internal clocks and it should wake him up before too long had passed. By then the worst of the danger would hopefully have cleared and he would be able to regroup. He set off a path to the nearest residence area when he stopped short.

He couldn’t use just any Stasis Chamber. Average ones wouldn’t have supplies of his medication in their life support. And the idea of waking up out of what was essentially a coma to potentially have a manic episode? There was no was he’d stand a good fighting chance. He had to get to his room.

It was risky to travel that far and he knew he was risking his life, but Ian figured every move he made was risking his life. There was no telling if this plan would even work, so it seemed like the best option to try for the best possible outcome.

By the time he made it to his residence hall it was silent in the labs except for the continuing blare of the emergency alarms. But there was no human noise. He hadn’t seen anyone else since he’d gotten separated from a group back near the botany wing. He ran to his door and threw it open, relieved to have made it in one piece and see his Stasis Chamber before him.

He didn’t bother removing his shoes or doing any of the standard preparations before he threw himself in it, sealing the lid over himself and sealing his fate, whatever it may be.

He rested there in stasis, life sustained, almost paused, for an unknown amount of time. When he awoke again he found what truly looked to be the aftermath. It was obvious time had passed, but with no one else alive to run the facility it had fallen into disrepair and he had no way of finding out how long he had been unconscious. Or what had woken him.

Ian suspected it was GLaDOS. Perhaps she had realized that with everyone dead she would have no one to control, no one to torture. Maybe she had scanned all the Stasis Chambers for any survivors and found him.

He refused to let her take him. No, he made his way fast and stealthy out of the main labs and back, back, back to the old wings. The blocked areas, outdated and unused. He worked his way deep, hidden as far from her as possible. Always careful, always cautious. Trying to plan an escape, but never risking being caught by her.

He pored over his planning. Writing up potential solutions and drawing himself maps. He didn’t know how, but somehow, some way, he was going to escape. And it was with this determination at the forefront that he was confronted with the fact he wasn’t as alone as he’d thought.

A fact that came in the form of a short, black-haired, and _exceptionally_ pissed off looking test subject.


End file.
